Old Man Shakes Fist at Words

I don’t know if it’s because I’m a writer or because of the anxiety disorder that’s been quietly narrating my life since middle school, but I am always listening. People talk, and my brain just… grabs it. Out in public, in movies, in books, in checkout lines—it doesn’t matter. I hear the words, turn them over, dissect their rhythm and meaning, and sometimes, if I’m honest, hate them just a little. Lately, I’ve collected a handful of phrases that have either baffled me, annoyed me, or made me want to stop talking altogether.

Also, in the spirit of full transparency, my friend Carl and I are currently in a mutually assured destruction pact (or, as The Algorithm would force us to say, a “m*r#d/self-unalive” agreement). We’re sending newsletter posts back and forth until one of us stops—figuratively, not literally—so if this email feels “off-brand” or suspiciously unrelated to my books, now you know why.

Alright, let's get to the list before we have to circle back after the holidays.

You want your doctor to be open, but not that open.

I was back in Georgetown the other day, visiting the doctor who gave me those two mini leaf blowers to shove up my nose every night. We were reviewing my sleep stats—apparently, I’m doing “just well enough to keep the insurance company happy,” which is the new definition of health, I guess. We wrapped up, exchanged the usual small talk, and then she hit me with: “Are you aware this location is closing?”

I wasn’t. At first, I was thrilled. No more thirty-minute drives up Highway 130 at ninety-five miles an hour in the middle of the day. No more pretending Georgetown is “close enough.” But before I could start celebrating my reclaimed commute, she kept going, telling me where the other doctors were transferring and then, casually, that she was out of a job.

It completely shattered my carefully maintained public human mode. I didn’t know what to say or how much sympathy was the right amount. Was I supposed to gasp? Offer condolences? Mostly, I just felt bad for thinking, does this mean I have to find a new doctor now?

On the way home, my brain gnawed on it for hours. Should she have told me that? Or am I only asking because it made me uncomfortable—me, the person with a job, driving home to my house, which I pay for with money from said job? A healthier person than I could have taken that piece of information and said, mentally, “No thanks, I don't need to own that.”

But me? My version of empathy is the chronic need to manage other people's emotions, so, as you can imagine, this was quite the breach of protocol.

A harmless question; an insane answer

One of my favorite luxuries in life is having an H-E-B right outside my neighborhood. It means I can dip in for a few items without dealing with traffic or crowds. The other day, all I needed was a case of water, a couple packets of Crystal Light Energy Drink (for the water, you see), and a few cans of wet dog food for Cheyenne because she's a princess and won't settle for anything less.

So there I was in the checkout line with my assembled items. The cashier was young and friendly—one of those people who seem genuinely happy to be alive, which I find both enviable and suspicious. She scanned my items, looked up, and asked, “What kind of dog do you have?”

Now, I know that’s normal cashier small talk, but for some reason, my Murderbot-brand Governor Module was offline. Before I could stop myself, I said, “Oh... I don’t have a dog.”

And then I just… stood there. The governor was still offline, so the “just kidding” never came. We both stared at each other in silence that could have lasted days.

Eventually, my brain rebooted, I explained it was a joke, and she gave me the kind of polite laugh reserved for customers you later describe to management as “potentially concerning.” I bagged my items and left, both of us relieved to be done with that particular social interaction.

And it’s not that I want to make people uncomfortable; I just don’t know how to talk like a normal human anymore.

If that makes sense...

I hear this phrase constantly at work: if that makes sense. It’s everywhere, tacked onto Slack messages, sprinkled at the end of presentations, and slipped into every conversation like a verbal security blanket. I don’t think anyone realizes how revealing it is. Those four words are pure psychology, a confession of uncertainty, a preemptive apology, and a plea for validation all rolled into one polite little package.

What’s interesting is how it differs from its cousin, does that make sense? That one at least invites engagement. It says, Hey, I’m trying to connect with you. Tell me if I’m not being clear. But if that makes sense doesn’t want an answer. It’s a defensive maneuver, an escape hatch for the anxious. It says, I probably didn’t explain that well, but let’s both agree to move on before anyone notices.

You don’t hear it among friends. You don’t end a story with “and then he kicked Wolfman in the nards, if that makes sense.” It’s the verbal equivalent of adding “if not, no worries” to the end of an invitation... soft, deferential, terrified of rejection.

Sometimes I think the healthiest thing you can do is surround yourself with people who aren’t afraid to say, “No, that doesn’t make sense, Daniel.” People who’ll help you clarify instead of just nodding along. Because the truth is, most things don’t make sense until someone calls you on them, if that makes sense.

Let's go... somewhere else.

Somewhere along the way, the younger generation decided that “Let’s go!” was the universal expression of triumph. I hear it everywhere: on Instagram, in restaurants, echoing from the next treadmill over at the gym. I don’t even know where it started. Sports, maybe? Gaming? Some forgotten YouTube clip that birthed a linguistic virus?

What gets me is how hollow it sounds. “Let’s go!” used to mean something... an invitation to movement, an imperative. You said it when you were actually about to go somewhere. Now it’s just a placeholder, a noise people make when words fail them. It’s the modern “woo!” with a sense of purpose it hasn’t earned.

And the question that always comes to mind is: go where? Where are we going? To lunch? To the circus? To enlightenment? I hear someone shout “Let’s go!” and my immediate instinct is to respond, “Let’s go somewhere else.”

There’s also something vaguely threatening about it. It’s barked, not said. Commanding, not celebratory. Like the person shouting it might actually drag you by the collar toward whatever bro-dude networking seminar they’ve envisioned.

Maybe that’s why it bothers me so much: it’s performative energy. Manufactured hype. Essentially... clapping for yourself. I’d rather sit quietly, watching the world vibrate with forced enthusiasm, and whisper, “Let’s stay.”

Six or seven blows to the head.

My eight-year-old son, Matador, has picked up the phrase “six-seven.” He says it constantly. It’s like “let’s go,” but distilled into pure, meaningless syllables. It’s 100 times worse and somehow manages to mean even less.

I first thought it was something kids said at school, some playground meme I wasn’t supposed to understand. Then South Park did a bit about it, which confirmed two things: one, I’m officially too old to keep up with linguistic trends, and two, it gave us the perfect way to fight back.

Now, anytime we tell him something will happen soon—dinner, bedtime, bath—we say, “We’ll be doing that in six or seven minutes.” And of course, he’s obligated by the laws of childhood to scream, “SIX SEEEEVEN!”

It’s become a full-blown ritual. Every night, we weaponize his own nonsense against him. He can’t not respond. He tries to resist, but the words just burst out of him like a sneeze. You can see the pain in his eyes, the internal battle between wanting to rebel and needing to complete the loop.

It’s killing us mentally, but it’s the only way through this. We’re fighting meme with meme, poison with poison. It’s our generation’s version of forcing your kid to smoke the whole carton so they’ll never touch another cigarette again.

We will break the cycle or die trying. Six-seven.

The way you speak makes me want to unalive myself.

And finally, we need to talk about unalive.

The self-censorship on social media is getting out of hand. Everyone’s so terrified of offending the great and terrible Algorithm that we’ve started mutilating our own language just to keep it happy. We’re not dying anymore; we’re unaliving. We don’t talk about murder or death or killing—we talk about “m*r#d” and “self-unalive content.” How can I take you seriously when you can’t even type murder?

It’s pure groveling at the feet of a machine that doesn’t care. It’s the linguistic equivalent of bowing to your toaster. And yet, everyone does it, as if The Algorithm were some fickle god we must constantly appease lest our content be consigned to oblivion.

Now, I get it... I clean up my language a little when I write here, mostly because some moms read my blog, and they are fine, upstanding ladies who don’t need to hear me drop F-bombs before lunch. But censoring yourself for views? That’s cowardice. It smacks of Fahrenheit 451 and 1984, the kind of sanitized doublespeak that makes everything sound safe and meaningless.

Just say what you have to say. Say death. Say murder. Say kill if you want to. Words don’t hurt the algorithm; they only reveal what kind of person you are when you’re afraid of being shadowbanned.

Speak freely, you ding dongs. The machines already own us; we might as well die literate.

The funny thing is, for all my complaining, I love this stuff. The weird phrases, the accidental poetry, the awkward confessions... they’re proof that language is still alive, mutating in real time while we pretend to have control over it. I listen because I can’t not listen, because somewhere inside every “let’s go” and “six-seven” and “if that makes sense” is a tiny spark of humanity trying to be understood before the machines smooth it all away. And if that means overanalyzing small talk and documenting my descent into madness in blog form just to keep pace with Carl and our blood-pact, so be it.

We all have our ways of coping. Some people talk. Some people listen. And some of us jot down little signposts to remind ourselves that language is still evolving... whether we want it to or not.